Google’s 14,000 ranking features leaked online

[Whitey]

A major leak has occurred exposing more than 14,000 ranking features.

It will take time to analyze, but the start of a useful summary with contributing links is available via @rustybrick here:

[seroundtable.com...]

Access to the leaked document can be found via the above link, although this may only be temporary as Google lawyers may try to shut it down.

[Shepherd]

Was a wonderful read. Not a lot of actionable data but lots of "validation"...

[superclown2]

Can anyone translate it into plain English? :-)

[Micha]

Conclusion: Google is lying through its teeth to us webmasters, everything John Mueller & Gary Illye have written in the last few days has been a complete lie and page authority is a major factor, just like clicks.

In other words, small sites never stood a chance with the juice store.

[BigKat]

Can anyone translate it into plain English?

Google lies. I think most of us knew this already, but it does point out some specifics which fully discredit Google's public support team IMO.

We still rank #1, but are buried under 4 ads, a PAA box and that disgusting AI Overviews for some keywords. Ranking #1 no longer produces much traffic for us, and this cancer will likely spread as Google needs more money to keep Google executives and their shareholders happy. In the weeks and months ahead, expect more lies coming from the DishonestPlex....

[engine]

Let's not waste time calling them names or denigrating, but, instead, let's see how we can use the information.

[Delta3Girl]

Let's not waste time calling them names or denigrating, but, instead, let's see how we can use the information.

We can multitask and do both.

[Fluff_Nutz]

Wouldn't surprise me if Youtube had a similar algo. Google should change their names to Greed Incorporate. Big sites are only big because they started early, they are not the best. They were just lucky enough to be at the right place, right time. This is a very biased and terrible way to run any search.

[superclown2]

In other words, small sites never stood a chance with the juice store.

This has been the case for years since Eric Schmidt stated "Brands are the solution, not the problem. Brands are how you sort out the cesspool".

For a small company to survive it would need a very unique product or service indeed. Then of course Forbes, someone at Reddit or a big consolidator would write about it and the good days would come to an end.

It's not fair but it's Darwinism in the raw. It will stay that way for as long as google holds onto their (allegedly illegal) monopoly.

[Micha]

@Motor Come on, let's at least have some fun.

But seriously: Let's assume that this leak actually applies to Liferanking and not to test environments or something:

How are we supposed to work with it? The whole thing just means that we have no chance at all because we can't influence factors like “clicks” because Google won't let us. Strictly speaking, this is a warning for us small website operators and the motto must be: Diversify your traffic as quickly as possible and stop relying on Google and its products and anyone using Google's statistics tool, for example, should throw it out quickly, just like Adsene.

Just for fun: If all small site owners did this, Google would look really stupid. Because we don't necessarily need Google, there are other options, but Google needs us and the company, in its arrogance, hasn't understood that.

[Whitey]

I’d be more interested to know if the whitelisting of major brands that dominate the serps and provide billions in click revenue for Google, breach fair trade guidelines in the US and Europe with the DOJ and DMA. The travel sector is of major interest.

A lot of this we knew or suspected. It looks like a basis of anti trust activity to me.

[Whitey]

More analysis coming in:
[searchengineland.com...]

It’s an old API document.

Will it change your strategic approach; is there anything you didn’t realize before and is this an intended leakage to divert attention from the unfolding Google AI overviews rollout and poor results?

Many more questions to come no doubt.

[JohnPoul]

It seems to me that this is probably a "controlled" leak to distract from the launch of SGE. I counted 5 out of 10 topics twenty minutes ago, and 7 out of 10 some earlier (on the r/SEO). And nothing about SGE. It's getting more interesting.

Well, do we still remember that SEO is social engineering?

[universenet]

a dog bone was thrown, google waitjng who will catch it...

[Rlilly]

Nothing New.. what I been staying for years.. Google is biased giving special favors too big brand names.. and the link is God.
Direct referral traffic and domain age is important..

[brotherhood of LAN]

>Can anyone translate it into plain English? :-)

It's similar in nature to the Yandex leak, but it's Google.

There's definitely some insights to be had.

Going by a lot of comments, it's just confirming what they already knew, or what Google was misdirecting about.

I'm sure the SEO crowd will dig deep and produce some of their own insights which'll be copied 50 times over and G has to rank them :-)

[universenet]

That Google search document is made to be ready documents for google lawyers when google will be in anti monopolist process with goverments soon, it is "leaked" by Google
Who need documents for proof activity?
Lawyers ..
All is clear

[Whitey]

Google’s response:
[searchengineland.com...]

[engine]

G just won't want this affecting their systems, and it's doubtful it'll do that to any severe extent.

The company is bound to change things.

I'm certain its scrambling to afford blame on the person leaking the material, and that may yet come to light.

[Mark_A]

It certainly is intriguing. I guess the potential to win at SEO is still enticing.

But 14,000 factors, that is a whole load of work there ..

[universenet]

14000 factors does not have any sense,
and everyone know that strongest factor is:
Who pay more for ads will be in first page on Google
And other ranking factors is not so important for google

[Whitey]

Michael King provides further analysis and insights:

Addressing common questions, critiques and concerns following the massive Google Search leak and how your approach to SEO should change.

[searchengineland.com...]

Lot's and lot's to absorb.

G just won't want this affecting their systems, and it's doubtful it'll do that to any severe extent.

Early days for me, as i rely on what the experts and the cross section of varying inputs to distil into something simplified, that my brain can comprehend.

I'd like to think this helps SEO's and site owners, at all levels, to improve and focus more on getting their site's better for users - and noticed, of course. A lot of chatter focussed previously on non productive areas. Hopefully these revelations and analysis will help.

That's despite all the current noise around AI overviews etc. and the pain inflicted in the HCU and recent core update.

I think these ongoing events shows that Google needs to focus on better communication for the benefit of healthier outcomes for all participants. That said, I don't like to read name calling [in particular the Google reps caught in the middle trying to do a constructive job with G policy restrictions on them]. Rather I'd like to read constructive ways to objectively make the web a better and fairer place.

[Micha]

Rather I'd like to read constructive ways to objectively make the web a better and fairer place.

A nice thought, but all parties have to play fair for that to happen, and they don't.

The issue of communication alone: nothing will change because Google has no interest in it. The company has no interest in website operators, as the last few weeks have shown very clearly.

The company seems to have just as little interest in its own users, as more and more people have been complaining for weeks that the search results are getting worse and worse. Reaction = 0. Always the same statement: We are making the web better. Well, more and more spam in the results, dangerous answers, you can't find anything anymore. Hm, it's not better, but Google doesn't care. The only thing that matters are the shareholders.

Of course you shouldn't insult the employees, but you should understand the frustration of the webmasters. The company is stealing content and giving no traffic back in return. As a website owner, you are helpless in the face of this situation and more and more people are losing their livelihood. Not everyone smiles when they are pushed into the abyss.

And on the subject of SEO: SEO is constantly changing anyway, but you should be extremely careful with the lessons you learn from documents. In my opinion, website owners should only do the bare minimum for Google and focus entirely on their readers/customers. It is a big mistake to focus too much on this company.

[universenet]

When you have 14000 ranking factors so this creating problem, question is not what is ranking factor, question is what is not ranking factor? Is colour car of my friend google ranking factor too? No? Are you sure?

[Whitey]

Here's some more analysis breaking down the leak that i found interesting. I guess there will be many more to come, but it's good to get some thought clarity going.
[searchengineland.com...]

I wonder what features stood out for the community, and how it opens up the observations and thinking behind the recent HCU and March core update. For me this reinforced my observations:

If you know how embeddings work, you can optimize your pages to deliver content in a way that is better for Google’s understanding.
- Topic focus is directly called out here. We don’t know why topic focus is mentioned, but we know that a number value is given to a website based on the site’s topic score.
- Deviation from the topic is measured, which means that the concept of topical borders and contextual bridging has some potential support outside of patents.
- It would appear that topical identity and topical measurements in general are a focus for Google.

Remember when I said PageRank is deprecated? I believe nearest seed (NS) can apply in the realm of topical authority.

It's just one component, I know, but for me observing a handful of sites, one very large one, the correlation to this stood out - simply no authority across a range of non core defined content, no semantic bridges to link them. e.g. a renowned and authoritative financial services site, writing about baby formula, just because it previously ranked. This done at scale weakened the site and tipped it over the edge IMHO. To me some applications of this concept are less obvious, but subject matter clearly was not aligned with the core interpretation of what the site's were about.

There's many more things coming out. More discussion and contribution is needed, which some leading SEO's are calling for. Hopefully this is coming.

[ghostofseo]

"Deviation from the topic is measured"

Wtf happened to freedom of speech, the above quote is enough for me to never want to write another article!

From Danny last year "You can, and should, write for your audience however you want on whatever topics you want. That's all our guidelines (I work for Google Search encourage people to do. You absolutely can have multiple topics within one blog."

[Whitey]

"Deviation from the topic is measured"

This conflict of messaging and understanding needs some clarification from Google, doesn't it? - Fingers crossed.

[Whitey]

Worth a read.

Wait what? Yes that’s right, I’ve independently discovered the exposed repo and have been studying it in solitude for a considerable amount of time. Dissecting, analysing, mapping, correlating… it was the most fun and exciting time of my SEO career.

I had preprocessed the whole repo and saved as a clean JSON file which I later added to a SQLite database with FTS and I could just look up what I wanted. Later on I was chatting to my RTX about this data in a RAG setup and eventually uploaded the whole 500,000 tokens of it to Gemini 1.5 Pro who I tasked to map everything for me and join the dots.

This resulted in an enormous corpus of well-organised data who I later passed onto Mike King. I’ll talk about that in a minute.

[dejanmarketing.com...]

[insistinglixi]

tks

[rominosj]

And on August 5th Google is declared a monopolist. :)
That "leak" is great help for Google competitors (Bing, DuckDuckgo, etc) to learn to rank websites better, increase other search engines market share, and that way Google would not be considered a monopolist any more. So, was it really a leak? Or, did Google just helped themselves to avoid being broken up?